People mostly don't know how to measure advice. You ask one person and they tell you "it's all about marketing", someone else will say that "technical excellence is more important than anything else". Even though a lot of advice is contradictory and very context-dependent, people don't notice this and lap it up.<p>The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?<p>The only good advice is an answer to a specific question with very clear boundaries: "How much is a good amount to spend on Facebook advertising?", "If you have a product aimed at the mass market and you can correlate success of click-throughs, spend as much as you want as long as it's less than what you make per-click".<p>Otherwise you get stuff like, "Facebook is great value for money" or "Facebook is a disaster" both useless pieces of advice.<p>I also suspect that those with the correct brain for business probably don't need very much advice because they will quickly work things out themselves.
Sorry to interject with something more generic but I feel it's somewhat pertinent. And sorry for the gray beard tone. Here it comes:<p>---<p>Obsessively following <i>anything or anyone</i> is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.<p>I was super good at multi-tasking all my life... until 2-3 years ago my brain started resisting me and sabotaging me at every turn. Gradually I realized that I am gulping <i>waaaaaaaay</i> too much information online; not just HN but favourite forums like ElixirForum, Rust Users, OCaml, and a few very big subreddits on top of that.<p>Starting to gradually dial down things did wonders. Even today I still insist on checking 2 outlets from the above listing and I am working on eliminating my fear of missing out. So far a good compromise has been to never check them during this or that hours. And even that helps.<p>---<p>Here's something even more generic as an advice but I also feel it applies well, especially nowadays with all the distractions that bombard us:<p>Do your own thing. Develop problem-solving skills. All the out-of-context advice is still out there. If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.<p>Start focusing. Start analyzing your own life, your own personal / work faults, and optimize for your own unique circumstances. Treat your life (or whatever part of it you want improved) as an optimization problem and work on that.
I have a friend who is going through a harrowing divorce, cheating on both sides, lots of family drama, she tried to light his car on fire, police called by neighbors for fighting, etc.<p>On Instagram he and his (soon to be ex) wife just tagged themselves this weekend putting up Halloween decorations, all smiley buying pumpkins and cooking truffle mac and cheese, liking each other's posts.<p>Meanwhile he is calling me at 1:30am asking if he can come sleep on our couch. I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.
There are some interesting observations here, but the piece basically ends up in the same place all self-help content ends up: here are the <i>x</i> things you should do.<p>> Instead of just watching, reading, listening to other people doing fancy stuff. We need to get going. Overcome the general feeling of malaise by start running, failing, getting up, and trying again.<p>This is basically the same advice that a lot of self-help gurus give. The only difference is in the packaging.<p>Here's a tangential piece of advice about listening to "successful people online": not everything is as it appears. In fact, much of the time these days, it isn't. Never forget that you have no way of knowing whether people are as happy, rich, etc. as they say they are, and even if they are, you have no way of knowing whether or not the advice they're selling you is how they got to where they are.
I stopped reading after the fifth one sentence paragraph or so. Author needs to stop reading successful bloggers telling them how to write for the internet. It just seemed to me like the article style was a symptom of the problem it was supposedly about.<p>That kind of writing<p>is so bloody annoying<p>please read some books<p>and then write more.
I think the reason to not follow successful people online is that they did not get successful by following successful people online.<p>Meaning - they have a big online presence post-success. They use the online presence to bask in their own glory.<p>But this isn’t just for the sake of basking in ones glory. It is a sort of way for the successful person to leverage their success into more success. A positive feedback loop of sorts.
I was excited to click through to this but was a little disappointed when I read it because it wasn't discussing what I was hoping for.<p>I think there's also an issue where you can follow a bunch of people that are already very successful and at the top of their fields on Twitter; they comment on the latest news, post their big conference talks, their brand new tool on Github, etc. You may have had a very unproductive day (or week) at work, and seeing these other people continue to ascend and excel makes you feel like you are not working hard enough. If only you picked up that new front-end framework. If only you went and got another certification. If only you created your own side hustle and turned it into a profitable business.<p>There are benefits to surrounding yourself with motivated, successful people - it can also create and foster a drive in you. But it's also important that you can relax and take the night off after work , even if you're not keeping pace with the most vocal and prominent avatars.
Another thing this doesn't touch upon is – what made these online "influencers" successful in the first place? Was it following all the advice that they love to dole out on Twitter and LinkedIn? Or the fact that they got lucky with a tech investment and/or were at the right place at the right time? The tech world is full of these personalities. Ultimately most of them (and the rest of us) are monkeys throwing darts. Some get lucky, others don't.
The title doesn't really match the advice.<p>The advice is separate from the number of successful people you follow online. The advice is simply to follow through with the tips you see from the successful people you follow with some tips on how to do that. Very meta.<p>I do find a bunch of irony in the dissing of self-help books, when you could copy-paste this entire article verbatim into like half the self-help books out of there and it'd fit right in.
Here's a reason that seems obvious to me: Cults of personality are dangerous, for cult members and for the community. Among other things, they are delusional; they aren't reality. Also, they give far too much power to the personality.<p>Why has that obvious knowledge been forgotten? Have we forgotten to be skeptical?
I stopped following a bunch of people on LinkedIn. It seemed like all they did was repost stuff from others - mostly infographics. None of the information was even helpful to an IC like me.
I have the opposite complaint of OP (though technically orthogonal to his point). I'm extremely annoyed at having to sift through the thousands upon thousands of self-help tidbits and life tip nuggets that fledgling VCs and founders -- who have accomplished *literally nothing whatsoever* once you round down -- offer on social media platforms. I'm talking about people who have written 100 small checks, but who haven't hit even a single grand slam. Or entrepreneurs who built an incremental SaaS business and got acquihired 5 years ago, and think that people need to hear their hot takes about success and life. It's extremely annoying.<p>On the other hand, I really enjoy the occasional pieces of fluff and advice offered by, e.g., the true outliers (e.g., the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels walking among us; the people have have actually come into contact with reality and accomplished non-trivial things that are very hard to repeat and generalize from). Not just tech billionaires; I think the same for the comparably successful scientists and technologists.<p>These people can't give you cookie cutter formulas for success other than "try to break other formulas". It's still inspirational, IMO, and far preferable coming from them than the phonies on Twitter seeking validation and fame.